Only 5% of aid pledged to Gaza actually received

Only about 5% of the international aid pledged to help rebuild Gaza after the conflict with Israel last year has actually been received, according to a Palestinian government source.

The source in the office of the Deputy Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa told humanitarian news service IRIN that while governments worldwide had pledged to contribute $5.4 billion to relief efforts, only about $300 million had actually been received, reports al Jazeera.

Gaza was heavily bombed by Israel during the month long war with Hamas in July last year, with nearly 100,000 homes destroyed and more than 200,000 people, most of them Palestinian civilians, killed, according to UN figures.

In a conference in Cairo following the conflict, countries around the world pledged billions towards reconstruction costs and aid.

In late January, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency announced that it had suspended all reconstruction work in Gaza after running out of money, and that tens of thousands of Gazans were living in rubble. “People are literally sleeping amongst the rubble, children have died of hypothermia,” Robert Turner, the agency’s director for Gaza said.

[International Business Times]

British aid worker shot dead in South Sudan

A British aid worker in war-torn South Sudan was shot dead late Tuesday in the capital Juba, the government said.

The Briton, who was working for the US aid organization The Carter Center, was killed by a gunman who followed him into his compound in Juba, according to presidential spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny. “He was driving in his car, and when he arrived at his gate he got out of the car, then while walking he was shot,” he said.

Ukraine cease-fire reached, along with $40 Billion international aid deal

A new cease-fire is set to begin Sunday in eastern Ukraine, in a deal after 16 hours of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. The leaders of France and Germany helped broker the deal, which calls for a buffer zone free of heavy weapons. News of the temporary peace emerged along with a new international aid plan for Ukraine.

NPR’s Corey Flintoff brings us these details that emerged from the talks in Minsk: “The immediate issues in these talks were stopping the fighting, establishing a security zone between the two sides, and pulling their heavy weapons out of each other’s range. The long-term issues are whether Ukraine will officially recognize the areas where separatists have declared independence, and give those regions power in the central government.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande acknowledged that more work remains to be done, even as they celebrated the temporary peace deal.

“We have now a glimmer of hope,” Merkel said, adding, “I have no illusions, we have no illusions.”

[NPR]

Increased risks for international aid workers

The death of Kayla Mueller of Prescott, Ariz., is a sobering reminder of just how dangerous the world can be for aid workers. The news sent waves of sorrow through humanitarian groups and the people who work for them — and raised many questions. We posed some to Trevor Hughes of International Relief and Development and Joel Charny of InterAction:

Is the world a more dangerous place for aid workers today? Hughes: Fifteen years ago, there was a kind of assumption that being a humanitarian gave you some level of protection. Obviously things have changed.

How so? What’s different in the way warring parties view aid workers? Charny: [The view is] if you’re not with us, you’re against us.

If you were a new volunteer or aid worker, what questions would you ask of an organization? Hughes: If you’re going to be traveling to a field site, ask: Who’s going to meet you at the airport, how will you know it’s them, how will they know it’s you, what happens if you show up and there’s no one there? You can see if they have protocols in place and share them. And those questions will get you to the group’s security person, because the recruiter won’t have those details. … If you’re going into an extraordinarily violent situation, like Syria, you need to ask yourself if that’s the place for volunteers. There’s a lot of hurt in this world; a lot of people need help. If you’re a doctor with serious wartime emergency room skills and you’re going in with an organization that’s established clinics in wartime situation, that makes sense. But make sure you’re not volunteering blindly or inappropriately.

No one wants to blame the victim, but when it comes to young workers, are they more naive about the threats out there? Charny: I went to Cambodia in 1980 when there was still a war going on between the Vietnam-backed government and the Khmer Rouge. I was 26, the exact same age as Kayla Mueller. When you’re that young, you feel invincible. You want to help people. You don’t spend your time preoccupied with everything that could go wrong. … It’s up to the organization to say, “…We want you to understand that if something terrible goes wrong, this is what we’re going to do about it.”

 [Read full NPR article] 

Worsening humanitarian crisis in eastern Ukraine

After 10 months of fighting, the United Nations reports that 5,358 people have been killed and 12,235 wounded in eastern Ukraine. Overall, the war has internally displaced 921,640 people within Ukraine, including 136,216 children. Around 600,000 have fled to neighboring countries, including more than 400,000 who have gone to Russia.

Larisa Yakovenko survived a direct rocket strike on her single-story Debaltseve cottage. But with the wreckage strewn about and her exit blocked, the 49-year-old woman with a disability was certain she would die from exposure to the cold or starvation, as she lay helpless amid the smoldering rubble. She screamed for help to frantic residents darting past for what seemed like eternity, until a local boy heard her call. He would stay with her until the missile attack stopped, and then go for help. The boy soon returned with Ukrainian army soldiers who carried Yakovenko to a bus that evacuated her to nearby Artemivsk. It is here, inside a Soviet-era dormitory on the edge of town where some 300 other displaced persons — dozens of them children — are being temporarily housed, that Yakovenko recounted her harrowing tale of survival.

Nearby, Svetlana, a 44-year-old mother of seven, is rounding up the six children with whom she fled last week after enduring months of heavy shelling around her home in the rebel-controlled city of Horlivka. One of Svetlana’s older daughters stayed with her husband in the besieged town. Three of her five children here, as well as Ilya, are under 18 years old. They haven’t had financial support since Kiev cut social services and the banking systems in Ukraine’s eastern regions last summer.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that move “drastically worsened the plight of the civilian population in areas not under government control.”

There are around 1 million other people like Yakovenko and Svetlana who have also been made homeless by the war.

[Mashable]